Mobile Marketing Goes Mainstream

My next session at the 2012 SAScon conference is about mobile marketing and includes Richard Gregory and Ben Wightman from Latitude, Mark Kuhilow from MyMCart, and James Hamlin from Seatwave.

Mobile Statistics & Paid Search

First up is Latitude’s Ben Wightman talking about the latest deveoplments in mobile PPC. Ben points out the strong growth of mobile in paid search clickshare in the past 6 months, correlation well with the release of new smartphone models. There’s a similar growth trend for tablets though it still lags behind smartphones.

Mobile consistently has the highest CTR in paid search, which makes sense as mobile search ads take up about 2/3rds of a smartphone’s screen. In terms of CPC, mobile is on average 45% cheaper than desktop, and tablet CPCs are around 18% cheaper. Ben advises people to segment their mobile and tablet campaigns and treat them separately.

Looking at ecommerce, mobile and tablet conversion rates were lower than desktops. Average order values (AOV) showed a different picture, with tablet users boasting the highest AOV, followed by smartphone and then desktop users. Ben expects this is due to the high price point of tablets requiring a certain affluence, which is reflected in the AOVs of these users.

Another reason to segment your campaigns for devices is the difference in usage patterns across times of the day and days of the week. Ben shows one example of usage levels around a football match, which show wild fluctuations in line with pre-match betting and matchtime kick-off.

Ben concludes by mentioning the future of mobile: Near-Field Communication (NFC). The latest devices such as the Samsung Galaxy 3 include NFC technology, and he expects the London Olympics to help boost this technology’s adoption as it features NFC in multiple contexts.

Mobile Commerce

Up next is Mark Kuhilow from MyMCart, a provider of mobile commerce solutions. He goes in to the history of mobile commerce, including the media reporting around it, with every year being declared the ‘year of mobile’ successively.

That year has come and gone and mobile has now truly arrived. An interesting conundrum currently in mobile is which technology to back: native apps or HTML5 websites, with the latter’s adoption especially helping grow the ‘mobile web’.

Panel Discussion

Richard Gregory kicks off the panel discussion by mentioning the phenomenal growth rate of tablet computing, and how ill-prepared many websites are for this new type of device. Mark Kuhilow feels that there is a different use case for tablets so they deserve a different interface design, and especially more entertainment value.

James from Seatwave thinks the lack of ability to do actual work on a tablet is actually its greatest USP, and website owners need to tap in to its unique use case by focusing on social sharing, video, gamification, and other use cases that fit the tablet format perfectly.

Again there were some great questions from the audience which wrapped up a fascinating session that definitely hit home the fact that no one has the luxury to ignore mobile internet any more – it’s do or die.

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